Kader Attia
Kader Attia (born 1970 in Dugny, France; lives and works in Paris and Berlin) had his artistic revelation when he went to the Louvre as a teenager and discovered the gallery devoted to "the painters of reality," lined with masterpieces by the Le Nain brothers and Georges de La Tour. As Attia said, "I was a teenager when I first strolled through the halls of the Louvre. At that time, museum admission was free one day a week. I took advantage of free entry to slip into the museum, in an attempt to escape my surroundings. The enlightened knowledge that artists, whether anonymous or not, purposely shared with other people through their work, spurred and guided my desire to break free. This sharing of knowledge initially involves the eye. Not the ocular eye, but a cultural, developed eye." Since that time, Attia has elaborated his own ambitious oeuvre at the intersection of film, sculpture, theory, and collective action, positioning himself as artist, theorist, and teacher all at once.
September 2025Special Report
OBJECTS WATCH US GO BY
We often imagine that museum curators, exhibition curators and collectors collect works of art and everyday objects. But if we move away from this somewhat phantasmagorical vision of accumulation, from a logic of bringing back the missing object, of metaphorically bringing back the phantom limb, we can open up another perspective. We are merely passing through, while the objects remain. It's the objects that watch us go by.
September 2025Special Report
OUR GAZE : THE MISSING OBJECT
The gaze is a missing object. The gaze is a movement of the soul, an ontological movement—a gaze towards the object, towards the work of art, towards the Other too. It's not a Bergsonian movement of time, it's a movement in space, without moving, and this lends itself very much to architecture. In particular, we were talking about time and how, in the end, looking is not just an ocular action, but also a bodily action: the body looks into a museum.
September 2025Special Report
FROM OBJECT FRAGMENTS TO PHANTOM LIMBS
Kader Attia experienced his artistic epiphany at the Louvre. Alongside with Elizabeth Peyton, he has been offered the status of “Hôte du Louvre” by the museum, acting as a fellow-traveller to the museum and holding a studio at the Pavillon de Flore. Amongst the many activities he has developed, including the Artist’s Lessons program, with a final sequence on September 25th, he conceived as seminar entitled What is Missing in the Object. This seminar was held at the museum’s research center, the Centre Dominique Vivant Denon, and brought together members of the curatorial team as well as leading figures from the contemporary world. The questions raised stemmed from both his work and the thinking inherent to the Louvre: how does the lack of an object, the lack in an object, the lack around an object, enable us to extend and clarify our perception of art, of the museum, and of our humanity?
